Carter and Arafat on their honeymoon
Posted on 10/11/2005 8:13:34 PM PDT by blam
Nobel judge quits with a blast at winner's writing
By Julian Isherwood, Scandinavia Correspondent
(Filed: 12/10/2005)
The Swedish Academy was shaken yesterday after one of its members resigned, describing as a farce the committee that awards the Nobel prize for literature.
This year's winner will be announced tomorrow, but the selection of the Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek last year was a huge blow to the prize's credibility, said Knut Ahnlund.
"It has done irreparable damage to the Nobel Literature Prize, both those who came before Elfriede Jelinek and those who come after her," said Mr Ahnlund, 82, until yesterday Chair No 7 in the 18-member academy.
"Most of the people in the academy obviously hadn't read more than a couple of pages [of her books] in some translations."
The choice of Jelinek, placing her among writers such as Albert Camus, Ernest Hemingway and Nadine Gordimer, was a travesty, argued Ahnlund, himself an author. Contrary to the praise lavished on her in the citation, Jelinek's prose was "a conglomeration of text shovelled together without even a trace of artistic structure", he said.
In its 2004 citation the academy announced that it was giving her the prize "for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power".
Ahnlund said: "Her work is static and completely engulfed in cliché. Artistic ability has been set aside simply to play lackey to ideology," His damning criticism of the academy and its secretive methods came after he announced yesterday that he "can no longer be a member of the academy. I see myself as an outsider".
Ahnlund is the third member to resign. In 1989, Kerstin Ekman and Lars Gyllensten stepped down in protest at the academy's refusal to support Salman Rushdie following Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa over The Satanic Verses.
A consistent theme of Mr Ahnlund's criticism was the centralised nature of choice within the academy. From almost 300 authors put forward each year a sub-committee of three reduces the field to five names, which are put to the full academy.
Thanks to internal squabbling among members, the decision as to who receives the prize is often not taken until a final meeting, immediately prior to an announcement.
Last Thursday's postponement of the award's announcement to this week is seen as a sign of major disagreement within the committee. But the academy's permanent secretary yesterday dismissed Ahnlund's criticism as irrelevant.
"Ahnlund hasn't worked with the academy since 1996, his chair has been empty, apart from a few holiday visits," said Horace Engdahl, the most powerful member of the inner circle, who will make the announcement tomorrow.
Favourites for the £700,000 prize are as obscure as usual and include Ali Ahmed Said of Syria, Nuruddin Farah of Somalia and Ko Un of Korea.
Commie propagandist Dario Fo (forget what year) was said to be even worser!
---In its 2004 citation the academy announced that it was giving her the prize "for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power".---
Ugh. lefty-intellectual speak.
1997, dumbie!
Sounds like Yoko Ono had a part in this somehow.
Knut Ahnlund has just brilliantly described every over-hyped leftist writer in history. Well done.
It ain't gonna be one of the FReeper favritz:
Not JK Rowland (7 cliches per page average - I counted m'self),
Not Tom Clancy ("The most successful American bad writer since James Fenimore Cooper" - Christopher Buckley,
Not Stephen King (writes "what used to be called penny dreadfuls" - Harold Bloom).
The Nobel in literature should be shelved, and the Nobel Peace prize is a joke. But I like it when the recipients fight each other.
I'd like to see her go on the board of the UN so they can all fall apart and break up as well.
Carter and Arafat on their honeymoon
Here's a review of "Lust," by last year's winner:
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
yet more proof - nobel prize in literature means nothing , October 1, 2005
Reviewer: pretygrrl (BROOKLYN, NY United States) - See all my reviews
Reflect on the sheer volume of books published every year around the world. Reflect further on the number of languages in which these books are written. These numbers alone will warn against expectations of a meaningful system of awards, recognition, etc. when it comes to the Nobel prize in literature.
Remember also that Mark Twain, Chekhov, Oscar Wild, Leo Tolstoy were all superseded by utterly forgotten *others* by the fickle Nobel.
It should then come as no surprise that Lust is trash. Garbage. It's terribly written. Admittedly, I dont speak German, so am unable to definitely judge who is at fault here - the author or the translator. I suspect it's largely the author. Example: "edifying edifices" is a sentence in Lust. That's it. That's the sentence. It's like some sophomoric butchery. Reminds me of the papers I wrote when asked to imitate Joyce's "stream of consciences", in 12th grade......
The emperor most definitely has no clothes here. It's painful to read due both to the writing itself and the half-formulated ideas expressed therein. When you tell me about a book by a post-WWII German, i think Boll, Grass. This latest name, Jelinek, does not belong. I just hope she will vanish in the not-too distant future, by way of the authors who received this prize instead of Tolstoy, Twain and Chekhov. Who were they, again?
And science and peace and........
I nominate Buckhead.
There was actually one sane member of the Nobel comitte that awarded Arafat the prize. Off course he walked out in protest, when he realised what the other members were about to do.
Stephen King is/was actually a fairly accomplished storyteller, though still "down market."
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